


reach out and touch faith

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/M, Fluff, Found Family, Holiday Traditions, Pre-Relationship Romance, Tumblr Prompt, an absurd number of references to hands, valentine's in space!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-03
Updated: 2018-05-03
Packaged: 2019-05-01 19:35:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14527668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Of course it’s Chirrut who catches them.





	reach out and touch faith

**Author's Note:**

> A quick "Jyn" prompt from @the-answer-is-dawn on tumblr that I combined with "skitzofreak barely ever writes kisses" because I'm petty like this. Also, I really liked the idea once I had it, and got carried away.

Of course it’s Chirrut who catches them.

Jyn thinks that she and Cassian are doing a pretty good job of avoiding or ignoring the pervasive (and somewhat obnoxious) Love Day celebration that has seemingly infested Home One today. It’s a major holiday in most Human-centric Core worlds, although each planet seems to have it’s own variation of traditional festivities. Coruscant-born soldiers are all giving their sweethearts little gifts, Chandrilians seem to be wearing flashes of red wrapped around their wrists or tucked into their collars, and the Corulag natives keep  _singing._ The worst part, of course, is how everyone keeps remarking on how romantic things are, or describing aloud their perfect date, or just generally sharing their little fantasies about love and kissing and…

Jyn shoves her hands into her pockets and Cassian keeps his impassive face straight ahead as they dodge through the crowds of rebels who all seem to be giving each other soppy smiles and painting little symbols on each other’s hands.

That’s the big one, actually - the most common Human Core World tradition for Love Day is this strange habit of kissing someone’s hands and then painting a little symbol that supposedly means something to you on their skin, to ‘remember the kiss.’ Jyn is trying not to notice, honestly, how many people she could have sworn would never willingly take part in this silliness suddenly have intricate, colorful marks all over their fingers or wrists or the backs of their hands. Mon Mothma has a little swirl of spring green on the palm of her right hand that she traces slowly just before the morning brief. General Cracken seems to have gained a stylized black eye on his right index finger. Hells, she thinks she even saw a pale yellow musical note peeking out of  _Draven’s_ sleeve. And it’s not just Humans; she’s seen Twi’leks with moons on their palms and hulking Dowutin with flowers on their thick knuckles, and  _everyone_ seems to have the Alliance starbird somewhere. Everywhere Jyn turns today, she sees the colorful tops of thick ink-pens in people’s vest pockets or clipped to their datapads.

“One of the quartermasters has been storing the pens up,” Cassian mutters to her as they sit down for lunch in the galley and he catches her eyeing a nearby couple drawing on each other’s palms brazenly, laughing as they try not to smudge their work. “Normally they are used by the medical personnel to mark the injured.” Jyn shrugs and turns away from the giggling couple, because it’s not her business. It’s not anyone’s business, right? No matter how publicly they are expressing their…relationship. Interest. Whatever.

She is just about halfway through congratulating herself on not being so damn obvious to the world when Chirrut slides into the seat next to her.  Since she’s sitting against the wall, the move effectively pins her in, which she notices with a raised eyebrow.

“Ah, at last,” Chirrut says without preamble, and waves a hand over his shoulder to Kay, Baze, and Bodhi who trail him by several steps. Jyn sees Cassian’s eyes narrow as he looks at Chirrut, and too late she realizes that Chirrut’s hands are both covered in dark red ink, little patterns and pictures all woven together until he appears to be wearing red lattice gloves, and a deep red pen cap is poking out of his sash at his shoulder. The patterns on his hands all center on a small drawing of a red planet or moon with a distinct continent pattern…Jedha. It’s Jedha, centered on the back of both Chirrut’s hands, and all the rest, the Starbird, the little wavy lines that look like wind, the flower patterns, they all surround the planet. Baze sits down heavily across from Chirrut, blocking Cassian in the same way Chirrut has pinned Jyn. Bodhi grabs a chair from a nearby table and drags it to the head of theirs, smiling a little sheepishly at Jyn as he does. There’s a similar drawing of Jedha done in black ink on the backs of both of Baze’s hands, although the only other adornment is a small silhouette of a bird in flight stretched on his left knuckles. Bodhi only has Jedha painted in bright blue on his right hand, and on his left, a detailed blue kyber crystal on his palm and a small blue lizard curled around his pinkie. The bright blue pen is tucked behind his ear.

“Hey, we've been, um,” Bodhi makes a disjointed gesture that tells Jyn he is both happy to see her and concerned that the reverse is not true, “Looking for, for you both.”

“They want you to participate in their ritual marking ceremony,” Kay informs them, and positions himself behind Bodhi, which forces the general flow of traffic to veer in a wide berth around the table end and away from the twitchy pilot.

“Since you were not present at morning meal,” Chirrut smiles beatifically and waves at Baze, who rolls his eyes and produces three of the temporary skin-ink pens from his chestplate. “We took the liberty of selecting for you.” Baze plucks a black pen from the three and sets it on the table, then tosses a small green pen to Chirrut, who catches it neatly and holds it up a few centimeters from Jyn’s face.

“I don’t celebrate Love Day,” Jyn says flatly, and Bodhi flinches but Chirrut’s smile simply widens.

Kay nods, an organic movement he picked up recently. “I told them that Cassian did not give himself identifying marks, and you were unlikely to be different.”

“And you certainly do not need to participate,” Chirrut flicks the green pen and it bops Jyn square on the nose, to her annoyance. She swipes at the pen and only scowls a little when Chirrut surrenders it easily. But then the red pen from his sash is suddenly in her face instead, and she growls under her breath, which does exactly nothing to dampen Chirrut’s grin. “However, since  _we_  do, I would appreciate your contribution.” He drops the pen without ceremony (Jyn catches it reflexively) and then holds his empty hand out to Jyn, level with her face.

“Isn’t this…” Cassian pauses, clears his throat, and proceeds as carefully as if he’s walking through a field seeded with landmines. “Is it not a…romantic holiday?”

“No,” Baze replies, and grabs Cassian’s wrist, slapping the dark blue pen into his palm without ceremony.

“It kind of is,” Bodhi says quickly, “on the Core Worlds, anyway. But, uh, well, it’s a pretty old, old holiday, and, um...”

“Many ages long past,” Chirrut begins in a sonorous voice, his left hand still in front of Jyn’s face but his right stretched out in the grand gesture of a storyteller beginning an epic saga, “When the Great Temple of Kyber was new and sparkled in the Jedhan sun with the glory of the  -“

“It was  _our_  holiday first,” Baze interrupts. “And it’s about family.”

Chirrut drops his right hand and sighs. “It is a beautiful story, you know.”

“In or out?” Baze demands, pointing at the blue pen in Cassian’s hand.

Cassian glances at the pen, then at Jyn, who opens her mouth to say no and ask Chirrut to let her up – and then closes it with a click, and takes the red pen. She grabs Chirrut’s hand a little roughly, pulling it away from her face, but he merely wraps his fingers around hers and squeezes. For a brief second, Jyn is standing again in a stolen Imperial shuttle, her hands freezing cold and dripping with blood, feeling lightheaded and off balance, and Chirrut reaches out and wraps his warm fingers around hers and she leans hard into the strength of it, this small point of contact, this unspoken promise that someone is  _there_.

In the Alliance galley, Jyn swallows and pulls Chirrut’s hand up, kisses the soft part of his palm under his thumb where no other design has yet been drawn, and then uncaps the red pen.

Bodhi says something under his breath to Kay, who replies crisply, “I said it was highly unlikely, not impossible. I allowed for Jyn Erso’s natural randomizing factor.”

She thinks maybe she should be offended at that, but she’s concentrating on drawing a small red starburst on Chirrut’s hand and trying to make it flow nicely with the rest of his intricate patterns. Anyway, in Kay’s processer, that probably counts as a compliment.

Across from her, Cassian is sitting stiff as a statue as Baze plants a rough, bristly kiss on his left middle finger and then draws a surprisingly delicate patterns of six interlocking circles down the length of it. He finishes before Jyn manages to get her careful starburst finished, and the big man leans back so that Bodhi can reach over and grab Cassian’s hand. Bodhi shoots Cassian an uncertain smile, and Cassian clears his throat and gives a weak half-smile back, his eyes flicking back to Jyn. Bodhi kisses the back of Cassian’s hand with a nervous peck, then presses it flat on the table and, oh, now Jyn knows who drew the intricate, precise image of Jedha on all their hands. Cassian’s mouth tightens a little as he recognizes the delicate patterns of Jedha’s continents forming on his skin, and Jyn’s stomach clenches but it’s Chirrut who says aloud, “It was never your fault, Captain.”

“I’m not Jedhan,” Cassian says quietly with his eyes locked on Bodhi’s fingers, which never falter as he adds in a faint line of shading that makes the dead world look more alive on Cassian’s skin than it ever will again in the black reaches of space.

“You were there,” Bodhi replies in a meditative voice, not looking up. “And you tried to stop it.”

Cassian opens his mouth, then closes it again, simply watching as Bodhi completes the drawing. Then Cassian takes the blue pen and holds it out to Chirrut silently. Jyn drops Chirrut’s hand, and watches as the blind man grasps Cassian’s pen and the hand that offers it, and drops a very ceremonious (and slightly overdramatic) kiss to Cassian’s unmarked palm. “Forgive me any smudges,” Chirrut says cheerfully. “Just let me know if I miss you entirely.”

To Jyn’s complete lack of surprise, he then proceeds to draw a beautifully even pattern of interlocking triangles that form into an angular flower blossoming all across Cassian’s palm.

Baze casually tosses his black pen over Chirrut’s busy fingers, and Jyn catches it and then snorts a little as Baze offers her his fist, holding it directly over Chirrut’s work. Jyn folds her legs under herself on the chair to give herself a little more height and reach, then leans over and kisses Baze’s calloused hand, plucking the black pen from his fingers as she does. Cassian catches her eye and smiles faintly. “At least you’re not blocking Chirrut’s view,” he jokes, and then looks both surprised and pleased when they all laugh, except for Kay, who is watching them all silently. A Chadra-Fan tries to shove past Kay, realizes that the droid has neither left any room for passage nor has any intention of moving aside, and shuffles off grumpily in another direction. In front of him, Bodhi gives the Chadra-Fan an apologetic wave, then starts rifling through his pockets, clearly looking for something.  

Jyn draws a rough square in thick black lines on the back of Baze’s hand, underneath the beautiful Jedha, and then fills the hard shape with thin, tight swirls. She finishes about the same time as Chirrut lets Cassian’s hand go, but before she can pull back, Baze flips her grip and holds her hand steady, and Chirrut reaches under her arm and picks up the hand she was bracing against the table. Caught from both sides, Jyn flashes an alarmed look at Cassian. He raises his eyebrows and holds up her green pen, the question in his eyes.

“Did I ever tell you,” Chirrut says pleasantly, his hand still warm on hers, “about the first Temple Guardian, the warrior Fen sa El’riin, and her great journey to the Wandering Star?”

“I like that one,” Bodhi said abruptly, looking up from where he was…drawing on Kay’s arm? Jyn blinked, but no, she wasn’t seeing things, Bodhi had produced some kind of white paint pen from somewhere, and was halfway through a series of interlocking gears he was drawing just above the articulated joint of K2SO’s right wrist. “sa El’riin has a lot of, um, adventures and that one’s pretty great.”

Jyn looks from the two hands grasping her own, to the pen in Cassian’s fingers, to the white gears stretching up Kay’s metal arm, and nods slowly.

Kay, Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze are all blocking out the rest of the galley, anyway. No one can see her, not really, except for Cassian, and his hands are already half blue. It’s not like the ink is permanent. And she can put her gloves back on, so that no one else can see. It won’t be anyone’s business but her own.

“Many ages long past,” Chirrut begins again, this time without the dramatic gestures, “Fen sa El’riin walked the sands of a lonely world and listened to the song of the kyber…”

Baze takes the green pen as Chirrut weaves his tale, and draws six small leaves on the back of her hand that interlock into a circle. He draws the leaves quickly enough, but then slows down and takes his time drawing careful details into them, little swirling veins and delicate stems.  Chirrut, meanwhile, takes the white paint pen from Bodhi and draws an elaborate grid pattern on Kay’s arm that somehow bends in on itself until it looks like an undulating oval, never once lifting the pen as he draws. When he’s done with the pattern (but not the story, which now has sa El’riin flying through a nebula full of dreaming ships) Chirrut tosses the paint pen at Cassian. Her partner manages to catch it just before it hits his head, and shoots Jyn an amused look at he gets up and walks around Baze to start drawing what looks like a precise pattern of binary symbols just under Chirrut’s looping design. Chirrut settles in his chair and continues to talk, although after a few minutes, he pauses and clears his throat. Baze adds another vein pattern to one of the leaves on Jyn’s hand.

Chirrut continues talking, pausing from time to time to clear his throat pointedly, and Baze’s leaves are so elaborate that they look like they are growing from her skin. At last, however, the big man winks at Jyn, then solemnly hands the green pen to Chirrut.

“Lovely,” Chirrut interrupts his own story to huff, then takes Jyn’s other hand and begins to draw a series of flowing lines around her right-hand knuckles. Jyn frowns and tries to follow the dizzying pattern of...flowers? stars? water in a stylized stream? She blinks and looks away, only to catch herself staring at Cassian’s frown of concentration as he draws…

“Is that a star-map?” Bodhi laughs, squinting as he watches Cassian working on his palm. “Are you drawing a, a star-map on me?”

Cassian nods absently, not looking up.

“That is the local map for Yavin IV,” Kay informs him.

“Ah, a good choice,” Chirrut says happily, pausing sa El’riin’s epic battle with the Yuuzzhan Vong invaders to nod in Cassian’s general direction.

“We haven’t been on Yavin IV in months,” Bodhi replies with a confusion that Jyn silently echoes. “And I wasn’t…there, much.”

“You brought the message,” Cassian replies, and Chirrut pauses the story once again so they can all hear him. “Without that, there would be no Yavin.” Cassian glances up. “And no rebellion.”

“Oh,” Bodhi clears his throat. “Right.”

Jyn sits quietly and watches Chirrut’s intricate design unfold across her hand, watches Bodhi draw another perfect rendering of Jedha on her skin after Chirrut is done while Baze adds a constellation of some kind to Kay’s arm (Kay announces loudly that droids lack lips and therefore he will abstain from any kissing). Then it’s Jyn’s turn to draw a small, crude blaster on Kay’s arm above Baze’s stars, which Kay critiques with great emphasis, but she hears his internal camera click when he looks at it and just smirks. Kay in turn draws a simple wavy line on the inside of her wrist – “it is a well known frequency,” he says when she looks up at him, but refuses to explain more and Jyn doesn’t press.

Bodhi is easy – she presses a hard kiss to his fingers and draws a slightly lopsided X wing silhouette across them, which makes him grin at her.

“And at last, sa El’riin came to rest on the great stone mesa overlooking the home she had sworn to the Jedi Masters that she would keep forever safe,” Chirrut says solemnly as Jyn reclaims her seat, “and where her staff touched the soil, there did her acolytes build a new Temple, a great altar to the singing crystals in the moon’s heart, and that Temple became the Temple of Kyber, in the Holy City, for many, many thousands of years to come.”

“Good story,” Baze grunts into the small silence, and then tosses the green pen to Cassian.

Jyn’s throat feels suddenly dry.

“An excellent story,” Chirrut smiles, handing Jyn the blue pen.

The silence suddenly seems too stretch over them, even the babble of the galley crowd muted and far away, somewhere outside the ring of people that have formed around Jyn. She meets Cassian’s eyes and sees him staring at her hands, at the blue pen held between her green-inked fingers.

“Chirrut,” Bodhi says suddenly. “Do you know, um, the story of Fen sa El’riin and the Stone Flower?”

“Many ages long past,” Chirrut replies immediately, tucking his red pen back into his sash and leaning back in his chair. “A young desert nomad came to Fen sa El’riin’s Temple, with the marks of chains on his wrists and his clothes all in rags…”

Jyn slips her hands across the table, and holds out her palm to Cassian. She isn’t sure what she’s expecting, isn’t entirely sure what she’s offering, but Cassian reaches back and carefully presses his palm to hers, then licks his lips and glances around the galley as if checking that no one is watching. Both Bodhi and Kay are watching Chirrut, who is speaking up into the air, his red-painted hands gesturing as he tells the story of a boy and a warrior and a magical crystal formed like a flower. Baze has his eyes closed, his arms folded on his belly and is, to all appearances, dozing. No one else in the galley seems to be paying the least bit of attention to them, so Jyn lifts Cassian’s hand to her mouth and tentatively brushes her lips against the skin of his inner wrist.

Cassian’s arm tenses under her touch, but when she looks up, worried, she finds herself looking at –

\- it’s the elevator on Scarif, the harsh lights somehow softening along the lines of his face, his eyes dark and quiet and somehow so wistful that it makes her heart ache in her chest, and before she can think better of it, Jyn dips her head again and kisses the soft, unmarred skin of his wrist one more time, and this kiss is less of a question and more of a promise. Then she drops the blue pen to the table and reaches out, snatching the green one from Cassian’s hand before he has time to look surprised. Kay has already drawn a blue wavy line on his wrist – the same frequency, she notes, as the one on her own – but Jyn just sets the green pen a little higher over the wavy line and draws another curving, winding pattern, twisting his hand until she circles his entire wrist with one unbroken line. She adds tiny sprouts and leaves all along the vine, summoning all her memories of that particular plant, the one she hasn’t seen since she was a teenager but would know instantly if she ever came across it again.

“The toldreyn vine,” she murmurs when she’s done, just loud enough that only their table can hear. “Grew on Onderon.” She looks Cassian dead in the eye and lifts her chin, determined to tell him the whole of it. “No matter how anyone tried to rip it up, it grew back.” She bites her lip, then gives him the rest. “In Onderonian,  _toldreyn_  means ‘unkillable.’”

Then she swallows and drops his hand, and her eyes, because she can’t watch him process that, can’t bear to see how he reacts. Instead, she fixes her gaze on her own hands and traces the delicate twisting patterns that Chirrut has left. Yes, it probably was flowers of some kind, something she didn’t recognize.

“ _I shall never surrender to you_ , cried the nomad,” Chirrut says, raising his voice slightly and clapping his hands together over his head, and neither Bodhi nor Kay look away from his antics. Jyn is more grateful for that than she could ever tell any of them. “And he picked up the fallen sword, which ignited with a burst of pure blue flame in his hand, and thus did Fen sa El’riin know him, and know what he would yet become _. I stand before you,_  said the desert nomad,  _as did my people in ages past…”_

Cassian’s eyes are so intent on her that she can feel the weight of it on the top of her head. She doesn’t look up, though, not even when he grips her hand in both of his and pulls it up to his mouth. His beard scratches lightly against her fingers, and he lingers there for a long moment, long enough that Jyn risks peeking at him through her eyelashes. She finds him looking at her as if he’s waiting, and the moment her eyes meet his, she feels his tongue flick softly across her scarred knuckles.

Her breath catches and she goes still, but no one else at the table (in the room, in the Alliance, in the galaxy) seems to recognize the enormity of what he’s done, what he’s given her, what he’s  _offered_. Jyn stares at him as he lowers her hand and picks up the blue pen, and begins drawing tiny, neat stars of varying shapes and sizes – no, not stars, they are something else, little spikey shapes that swirl across her knuckles and curl around the base of her fingers.

“Snowflakes,” he says at last, under the easy flow of Chirrut’s story. He brushes his thumb over the ink as if checking that it’s dry, but his touch lingers where his mouth had been, and Jyn shivers before she can stop herself. Cassian’s grip tightens, he sets the pen down, and she can see him gathering his courage as he looks up at her. “It’s one of the only things I really remember,” he tells her, “about Fest.”

“ _I have wandered all the paths of the desert_ , said the nomad, who was no longer a boy,” Chirrut sweeps his hands out, “ _and now I shall wander all the paths of the stars._ And then he stretched out his hand to Fen sa El’riin,” Chirrut stretches out his hand across the table to Baze, who opens one eye and glares at him, unimpressed, “ _But so long as you hold true faith in me,”_ Chirrut continues, curling his fingers as if Baze’s were snugly within his own, “ _I shall never again walk with empty hands._ ”

Jyn looks at the snowflakes on her knuckles and the vines around Cassian’s wrist, and thinks that maybe she understands.

“An obvious parable for tenants of the Force worship practiced in the Terrabe sector,” Kay says loudly, and the sound of his practical voice jars Jyn out of whatever momentary haze she’s been in. She pulls her hands back just as Cassian lets go, and makes a point of looking at Chirrut as if she’s been focused on his story this whole time.

“It’s a good story,” Bodhi says defensively. “Kind of romantic, too, which, you know, fits the, the day.”

“I need to get back to the comm hub,” Cassian pushes himself abruptly to his feet. Jyn jumps up too, because yeah, definitely, back to work. That’s a good idea. She can…she can do work.

“Thanks for, um,” Bodhi holds up his hands, and smiles at them both a little nervously. Cassian nods and Jyn bumps Bodhi’s shoulder as she passes, and they both stride out of the galley without another word.

“We will see you at dinner,” Chirrut calls after them, “in a manner of speaking, of course,” he adds with a laugh.

Jyn follows Cassian back to the comm hub with her hands in tight fists, debating with herself whether she should stop and pull her gloves on or not. She feels startlingly naked without them, but to stop and fish them out would just…draw attention, wouldn’t it?

She’s just about to do it anyway when Cassian suddenly reaches out and winds his fingers around her wrist. “Jyn,” he says, and sweeps a quick look around the empty hallway. Then he lifts her hand and Jyn’s whole body feels like it’s burning up, like a fever has ignited under her skin, spreading like wildfire down her arm and throughout her body because Cassian is kissing her hand again, his mouth hard on her knuckles over the blue swirl of snow, his scruffy beard soft where it brushes her. And then he speaks and Jyn feels a little lightheaded at the sensation of his lips moving against her fingers, “Is this…good?”

Her throat is dry as the deserts of Chirrut’s stories, but Jyn nods and manages to force out the words anyway. “Yeah. It’s,” she smiles, and because no one is around and her vines are wrapped around his wrist, curling over his pulse like a tether, like a sentinel, she dares to step a little closer and press her free hand against his cheek, tracing a pattern along his jaw that mimics Baze’s interlocking circles on his finger.

“It’s good,” she promises him, and feels his smile on her skin like sunlight.


End file.
